


Making only good choices

by Slant



Series: The legion of face-punching [8]
Category: Mahou Shoujo Madoka Magika | Puella Magi Madoka Magica
Genre: Canon Compliant, Despair, Existentialism, Foucault, Franz Kafka References, Hegel, Magical Enbies, Magical Girls, Nihilism, Powerful idiots, but like positive
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-08
Updated: 2019-05-29
Packaged: 2020-02-28 16:28:53
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 2,478
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18760141
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Slant/pseuds/Slant
Summary: "I wish," said The Vacuous Gesture, without a moment's hesitation, "to live a brief, futile life in an uncaring universe doomed to heat death.""I'm sorry, I'm afraid I can't do that," said Kyubey.





	1. Inspiration

It is an embarrassingly large number of reparations before Homura thinks: maybe the best way to make sure Madoka isn't involved is to not involve Madoka. She's not monster (not yet; how many cycles she's got left before she stops caring about humans entirely is clearly limited), so she's not just going to grab innocents at random to throw into Kyubey's path. She picks a bunch of cape-and-spandex weirdos; people with an existing commitment to fighting for ... honestly she couldn't be bothered to read all of their website. They had survived fighting The Wealth Of Nations*, which makes them victors in a first-of-May related struggle, which is probably the best she's going to get. She lures them into a Labyrinth, grabs the creepy little construct by the scruff of its neck and throws in in after. 

*An evil robot programmed by the Adam Smith Institute.


	2. Introduction

Inside the labyrinth, weird little cloud-dudes danced in fantastic yantra, circling closer and closer around the Legion of Face-Punching. Cranial Trauma looked at them with cautious dread. There was a rhythm to these things, so he just knew that they were going to have an unrelated argument, he was going to lose it, and he was going to stick some part of his anatomy between his friends and whatever this capering, chanting nightmare was. Ugh.  
"Roshambo?" he said to Diversity. Xe made a fist with one elegant, flawlessly carved hand, getting ready to throw paper. Cranial Trauma threw stone in 19 games out of 20.  
"Are you two trying to cut me out of something just because it is futile with strong negative consequences?" asked The Vacuous Gesture, "I refuse to allow my will to be circumscribed by fear of the unknown."  
"Making only socially-approved choices is like a prison," agreed Hypermind, "but sticking your frail organic bits into whatever that is is going to be a hospital. And hospitals are like a prison."  
"I can't perceive any mental states," she added, "there's a general menace, but I can't individuate them."  
"It's a Witch," said an unexpected, but sweet-sounding voice in their heads, "they are creatures that hide in these Labyrinths, and call out to humans, driving them to death." An unknown creature came bounding through the twirling masses towards them.  
"It you make a contract with me, I can grant a wish, and give you the power to fight Witches." Perhaps Hypermind sensed the micro-inflected over-eagerness with which the creature said "contract", but she was far too slow.  
"I wish," said The Vacuous Gesture, without a moment's hesitation, "to live a brief, futile life in an uncaring universe doomed to heat death."  
"I'm sorry, I'm afraid I can't do that," said the creature.  
"It seems a reasonable request. Minimal, even. Whyever not?"  
"It is not beyond my power. My programming won't let me. You see, the emotional life-cycle of a magical girl results in _ex nihilo_ production of energy, which my people use to prevent heat death. It is for this reason that we make magical girls."  
The Vacuous Gesture flinched; je was clearly horrified. "You use this process to avoid the emotional crisis of confronting your own brevity?"  
"We can't experience emotions. If we could there would be no reason to involve humans."  
"No reason to place the labour of producing energy on a less advantaged group? I'm sure you'd have found something," stated Diversity.  
"I suppose that from your point of view we do share a number of characteristics with human neo-imperial projects, but I assure you that we have run the numbers and even giving maximal weighting to the magical girl's themselves, we predict a maximally felicific outcome."  
"And how many near-identical yous exist to beef up the weightings on your side?" asked Hypermind.  
"I'm more concerned that this contract lets you pursue ... non-despair" The Vacuous Gesture shuddered. "You claim not to have emotions, but clearly something motivates you to engineer a existence not bound by thermodynamics, and to push the cost of it onto an out-group. You may call it something else, but it is the act of an intelligence terrified of its own limitations, fleeing death, seeking, in wealth and power and control of others to find an answer to its fear of its own frailty."  
"We are not afraid," said the creature, inflexionless and sweet-voiced. "We are preserving our own existence. We do not justify ourselves to lesser creatures."  
Then Cranial Trauma knelt down and punched it in the face. The labyrinth provided him with more faces, and he punched them. A second wave of the weird white rabbit-creatures also turned up, and he punched their faces, too. 

* * *

Homura, watching silently from outside time, took stock of the exchange. Okay. It had gone really badly, pretty much instantly, but it was something new: no magical girl ever went from complete ignorance to unfulfulable wish like that. These idiots had a lot of potential.  
If Homura could just finesse them through their initial contract, this could go somewhere interesting.

* * *

"I wish I could understand Hegel."  
"That's not possible."  
"Figures."  
"Much of your self-image is tied up in not understanding Hegel. Maybe if you phrased it as "I wish someone as similar to me as possible understood Hegel.", you'd get a near-clone?"  
"Ah the moral archetypes: the good twin, the evil twin and the twin that understands The Phenomenology of Spirit."

* * *

"I wish to non-coercively make a world where everyone is safe to be their truest selves."  
"Not possible. "

* * *

"I don't need a wish to punch you in the face, do I?"

* * *

"Kyubey-san," said The Vacuous Gesture, "I think that the problem is that you have all of these hopes. You hope that there is some way that you get to live forever. You hope that you are safe. You hope that you are not alone. And then when your hope is in contradiction with your experience, you must lie to yourself to preserve that hope. You need some way to get from the world you live in to the world you hope for, so you make it up. You can harvest magical girls to oppose entropy! The feelings of lesser creatures, which you totally don't experience, reverse entropy. You have many bodies, so you're not alone. You have many bodies so you are safe. In fact you are so safe and independent of your bodies that none of them matter to you; you can prove this to yourself by eating them when they fail, but this is just another lie that you tell yourself."  
"You will die. You have feelings. People who oppose you are not inherently lesser. Your loss really is loss. You are, ultimately, alone. Anyone you know will disagree with you about something."

"But don't worry," added The Vacuous Gesture, "once you have accepted the world and internalised your despair, you can keep doing the things that you love. You can still be terrified of death and lash out at creatures that can't effectively oppose you. You'll just also be able to admit to yourself it was because you hated them for being happier than you."  
"You will still torture children, you'll just admit that you are choosing to do so."

* * *

These were not, Homura realised, useful idiots that she could shove down Kyubey's bottomless maw to buy Madoka another day in the sun, another day of innocence. These were dangerous idiots with razor-sharp personality flaws, who took nothing seriously, who asked too many questions, and never, never let exigent circumstances come between them and their nonsensical obsessions. 

Everyone will die? — A+ inclusion.  
Failed wishes dragging you into despair? — You should be there already.  
Walprugisnacht hangs huge and unassailable, inverted over the city? — It's got a real punchable face.  
Loop time and try again? — Hypermind is performing a massive real-world Monte-Carlo study of the phase space of social interventions. Which sounds like harmless academic nonsense, but what it really means is that she initiates half-a-dozen programs with far-reaching and unpredictable social repercussions every day and she picks which ones in particular to do using quantum-generated random numbers. The cycles are always different- people are not clockwork after all, but once Hypermind arrives in the city, institutions flower in absurd profusion, behavioral norms diversify, self-examine and better themselves, and every single person is thrown off their life-trajectory by some degree every day, differently in every cycle.

Powerful. Idiots.


	3. Insipid

It took far too many tries for Homura to get there, but finally, the Legion of Face-punching had survived to confront Walprugisnacht. Hypermind and The Vacuous Gesture were contracted. The Vacuous Gesture's soul gem always came out solid black but jee never showed any sign of becoming a Witch, and as far as Homura knew, jee didn't actually have any powers. She'd heard jem explain that jee had transformed in some of the other repetitions, but had never seen any difference. Diversity and Cranial Trauma weren't contracted and Homura had made sure they hadn't tried, because they didn't have souls and Kyubey telling Diversity that xe didn't have a soul always lead to a huge argument. 

There had been a lot of annoying events in the cycles along the way: That Time The Vacuous Gesture Talked Oktavia von Seckendorff Out Of Her Labyrinth ("Dispair not for your weaknesses and failures, embrace your despair as your will to be your truest self"); Homura had had to rewind time a week before the arrival of Walprugisnacht because of that. That Time Cranial Trauma Punched Homura Despite Being Frozen In Time. That Time Homura's Parents Tried to Reconnect Because Of One Of Hypermind's Social Interventions. That Time The Vacuous Gesture Died Of An Easily Treatable Tooth Infection That They Refused To Have Treated Out Of Spite. That Time The Yakuza Moved Out And Homura Couldn't Steal Their Guns Because Of One Of Hypermind's Social Interventions. That Time Kyoko and Sayaka Banged, Like, Eighty Times. That Time Kyousuke Got His Hand Broken Again, Dear Spirits, The Whinging. That Time Madoka's Family Moved Away Because Of One Of Hypermind's Social Interventions.  
As far as Homura was concerned, Hypermind was beating her, and she didn't even know Homura existed.

Homura had all of her explosives set up, but she wanted to see what her dangerous idiots would do before she added any more variables. 

"Stay back, we don't know what that thing can do," warned Cranial Trauma. Walprugisnacht was very intimidating, and even Diversity's marble body lacked the stolid damage-tolerance of his malleable clay.  
"That's why I have to go CeeTee; I'm only one of many who can die ineffectively failing to achieve anything," said The Vacuous Gesture.  
"Kyubey-san, I'm really glad that I made a contract with you. Even though you intend to use my power to prop up your delusions about entropy, it will all be worth it if I can just die performing a grandiloquent gesture that no one witnesses."

* * *

The Vacuous Gesture had died a lot in Homura's experience, and jeir deaths had spanned a spectacular range from the pathetic (the tooth thing), through unremarkable accidents, the typical injuries of the high-risk Magical Enby lifestyle, all the way up to the world-shatteringly weird business with Oktavia von Seckendorff, and the time jee talked Kyubey into hiding under Madoka's bed and crying for a week. Kyubey didn't even have tear-ducts. It had had to gouge out its eyes and use the vitreous humor as tears. Jee really could achieve something amazing against Walprugisnacht, but equally, jee could trip on a pebble and knock jemself out for the duration. 

* * *

The Vacuous Gesture walked towards Walprugisnacht. Trumpeting murderous minions struck at jem, and the blows fell into jeir body like pebbles hurled into interstellar space, tiny assemblages of intent and force and matter, lost to the void; the perspective of it gave Homura vertigo, but it was a good vertigo. Her idiot was doing something!

Jee looked up at Walprugisnacht and spoke a single word "Insipid."  
Then Walprugisnacht fell out of the sky onto jem.  


* * *

Cranial Trauma found jem amongst the rubble, bleeding from jeir ears and making horrifying burbling sounds with every breath. He'd been in the capes game for a long time, but this part never got easier, even when you knew that your dying colleague had always thought of jemself as your dying colleague. You did get better at it though. Since jee couldn't speak, he spoke gently for jem, "I guess that if you are going to die, you should do it doing something meaningless and lacking even originality."  
Jee managed a momentary smile, but jeir eyes were blurry and unfocused. He knelt down and supported jeir head, blinked back tears and said "Do you remember this? I learnt it for you."  
""Alas", said the mouse,", said Cranial Trauma, ""the whole world is growing smaller every day. At the beginning it was so big that I was afraid, I kept running and running, and I was glad when I saw walls far away to the right and left, but these long walls have narrowed so quickly that I am in the last chamber already,"  
His voice broke; the only sound was the air bubbling in and out of The Vacuous Gesture's lungs.  
""and there in the corner stands the trap that I am running into.""  
He gently stroked a hunk of bloody hair off jeir lumpen, asymmetric face.  
"You only need to change your direction," said the cat, and ate it up." 

The Vacuous Gesture gave one last hacking laugh and then breathed no more. Cranial Trauma closed jeir eyes and kissed jeir brow.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The story that CT tells is Kafka's "A Little Fable". <3
> 
> CT doesn't mind being told he doesn't have a soul; he has one of the Names of God inscribed in his clay, which is good enough for his purposes. Diversity carved xemself out of marble and knows that xe didn't carve a soul. Denying them magical personhood because they don't have souls is unacceptable anti silicateism.


	4. Irrelevant

After so many repartitions, Homura was almost fond of the Legion. They squabbled endlessly, like happy children. Like characters in a sitcom that you'd watched for years. She was angry with them, of course: they didn't —wouldn't —hadn't saved Madoka, but still, she liked Diversity's belief in her dream of a better world, and she liked the way that Cranial Trauma's brow scrunched whenever he saw a new face. She respected Hypermind, who had done more to differentiate her endlessly repeated month than anyone, Homura included; she almost felt guilty for not saving the alternate-timeline research data. In the end, though, she gave up on them. Perhaps it had always been foolish to hope that salvation could come from outside (in her head, she heard The Vacuuious Gesture echoed "it is always foolish to hope").

The stage was set, the actors were assembled; bringing on a new cast just before the climax was artistically suspect, if nothing else. The next time Homura woke up in the hospital, she smiled, fixed her heart, opened her eyes and went to school. Madoka was there. Everyone she needed was there.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Ironically CT is exactly the right sort of simple direct problem solver to ask "You've got time travel. Why don't you go back and kill Walprugisnacht before she becomes a witch?", but Homura would never give him the information to let him ask this


	5. Coda

"I'm no Von Neumann machine," said Cranial Trauma, "golem-tongue can't reproduce the Glory of the Name that animates its clay."   
He stuck out his tongue for emphasis.  
"But that doesn't explain why I suddenly can't say Mᴀ-ᴏᴋᴀ."


End file.
